A new report from the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health and the Center for Reproductive Rights calls on state lawmakers to increase access to contraceptives, cancer screenings, and abortion care and strengthen the social safety net, among other things.

A new report from a Texas reproductive rights advocacy group calls on state lawmakers to increase access to contraceptives, cancer screenings, and abortion care; strengthen the social safety net; and narrow the reach of the Texas border patrol in order to increase the health, safety, and wellbeing of Texas Latinas.

The report, A Reproductive Justice Agenda for Latinas, released by the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health (NLIRH) and the Center for Reproductive Rights, provides concrete policy recommendations that follow up on their 2013 Nuestro Texas report, in which Texas women living in the Rio Grande Valley told stories of their struggles to access, and pay for, reproductive health care, and the impact those struggles have had on their communities and families.

The new report, and an upcoming lobby day at the state capitol building where Latina activists will share recommendations directly with lawmakers, marks a historic moment in Latina activism, said NLIRH’s Texas policy and advocacy director, Ana DeFrates.

“In many ways, it’s an introduction to lawmakers of who we are and what we care about,” DeFrates told RH Reality Check. “I’m very proud about this report starting some conversations that even really well intentioned, very smart people haven’t thought about.”

The groups’ recommendations are sweeping, drawing on a reproductive justice framework that touches on issues ranging from health-care policy to transportation challenges to immigration reform.

“We’re trying to talk about what needs to shift politically and culturally to make Texas better for Texas Latinas,” said DeFrates, who hopes that the report will address “misconceptions about what Latinas care about.”

Texas Latinas living in the Rio Grande Valley, who experienced a disproportionately negative impact from lawmakers’ drastic cuts to family planning funds in 2011 and who have so far lost two of three local abortion providers after the passage of the state’s 2013 omnibus anti-abortion law, have higher incidence rates of cervical cancer than white or Black women in the state.

They also face extremely limited access to public transportation, particularly in rural areas and colonias, whichmakes it especially difficult for them to travel to doctors’ appointments. And Texas Latinas without legal U.S. immigration status are unable to travel past interior border patrol checkpoints, further limiting their ability to access services outside of a 100-mile demarcation from the U.S.-Mexico border.

But DeFrates said “it’s precisely those challenges that are mobilizing Latinas to get active and get involved.”

Some of the report’s recommendations could garner bipartisan approval—for example, ensuring that community health workers, or promotoras, are better supported and utilized, or developing a Texas-specific solution to the state’s insurance coverage gap.

Some suggested changes, such as expanding abortion care access, ask legislators make a complete turnaround from their past legislative stances.

But it’s all part of a longer-term plan, DeFrates said, to build a better Texas for Latinas.

“We couldn’t avoid talking about the glaring need that exists,” DeFrates said. “While some of the recommendations are more forward thinking, they set the ground work for the Texas we’re organizing for and working towards.”

Reproductive rights organizations are calling on President Obama to fix a global health policy that is restricting women’s access to abortion more than the law actually requires.

For 40 years, the Helms Amendment has forbidden the use of U.S. foreign assistance funds for abortion “as a method of family planning.” But it has long been interpreted to prohibit funding for all abortions without exception, including in cases of rape, incest, or life endangerment.

Every other federal abortion coverage restriction includes exceptions for these extreme circumstances. Given that 47,000 women die yearly from unsafe abortion, mostly in developing countries, and given that rape is used as a weapon of war in conflict zones, advocates say it’s time for a change.

Reproductive rights groups, including Planned Parenthood, the Center for Reproductive Rights, Population Action International, and Ipas, started tweeting last week under the hashtag #HelmsHurts to spread the word about the harmful policy.

“No woman should be forced to carry a pregnancy caused by a sexual assault or that threatens her life,” said Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, in an email to supporters.

Overturning the law entirely, which advocates say is still a needed step for the health of women and girls abroad, would take an act of Congress.

Congress recently expanded abortion coverage for Peace Corps volunteers in cases of rape, incest, or life endangerment, bringing coverage in line with other federal policy. But fully repealing such a long-standing anti-choice measure is hard to imagine in the current GOP-controlled Congress.

In the meantime, advocates say, Obama can make sure the law is correctly interpreted and bring global policy in line with domestic policy.

During the onslaught of anti-abortion legislation of 2014, a powerful truth emerged: When those who oppose legal abortion hear the personal stories of pregnant people who have chosen to terminate, they are more likely to shift their view about whether the procedure should be legal.

So it’s no wonder then that anti-choice advocates spent every precious second of Tuesday’s oral argument time before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit intellectualizing abortion rights and controlling, whenever possible, the narrative of who, how, and when abortions happen. For the most part, the conservative justices of the Eighth Circuit were only more than happy to help them along.

At issue before the federal appeals court are two different, but related, anti-abortion laws that directly attack the rule that states do not have the power to ban abortion prior to fetal viability. First is a legal challenge to an Arkansas law that bans abortion when a fetal heartbeat has been detected, and at 12 weeks of pregnancy. Last March, a federal district judge permanently struck down the ban, saying the extreme measure would “prevent a woman’s constitutional right to elect to have an abortion before viability.”

Second is a challenge to a North Dakota law, considered to be the most extreme in the country, that bans abortion as soon as a fetal heartbeat is detected, which can be as early as six weeks of pregnancy. A federal district court judge temporarily blocked the ban in July 2013 and then permanently blocked the law in April 2014, noting that “the United States Supreme Court has spoken and has unequivocally said no state may deprive a woman of the choice to terminate her pregnancy at a point prior to viability.”

There are a couple of important points to note about the Eighth Circuit. The conservative circuit—which covers Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, and Arkansas—helped produce the most recent, and dangerous, Supreme Court jurisprudence on abortion rights, Gonzales v. Carhart, a Roberts Court decision that has empowered anti-choice lawmakers to pass abortion restrictions grounded in junk science, with very little the courts can do to stop them. The Eighth Circuit has also endorsed state-scripted anti-abortion disclosures that force providers to recite them under the guise of a patient’s “informed consent.”

The Eighth Circuit is in many ways as conservative and anti-choice a federal appeals circuit as the Fifth Circuit, which infamously created a recent human rights crisis in Texas.

That judicial activism was on full display during Tuesday’s argument, with the justices searching for a measured way to overturn the two district court decisions blocking the restrictions. The justices were three George W. Bush appointees: Judge Bobby Shepherd; Judge Duane Benton, a former political appointee of then-Missouri Governor John Ashcroft; and Judge Lavenski Smith, a Mike Huckabee political ally whose appointment was opposed by both Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America. Defending the Arkansas and North Dakota laws were assistant Arkansas Attorney General Colin Jorgensen and private attorney Daniel Gaustad, both of whom defended the radical power grabs by their respective states as important and necessary evolutions in the law.

“We can’t look at these kinds of cases in the vacuum of Roe v. Wade any longer,” argued Jorgensen as he pressed the judges to overturn fetal viability as the bright-line limit on state power to regulate reproductive rights.

Gaustad took Jorgensen’s argument even further, arguing for the Eighth Circuit to declare a bench trial on the question of when fetal viability occurs. The facts and circumstances that led the federal courts to declare a right to abortion have changed to such a degree, Gaustad argued, that the entire issue of abortion rights should be reopened.

“The underpinnings of Roe and Casey have been invalidated,” Gaustad claimed.

Those underpinnings, both attorneys claim, include the fact that both states have in place “safe haven” laws that allow pregnant people to surrender live births to the state and relinquish parental rights. According to both Jorgensen and Gaustad, those laws relieve women of their “undue burden” of the legal responsibilities that come with the compulsory birthing their restrictions would ensure.

As to whether they believe the undue burdens associated with carrying to term a pregnancy as mandated by the state, the attorneys were predictably silent.

What are the attorneys for Arkansas and North Dakota aiming for here? What’s their endgame? Yes, both are defending state-level anti-abortion restrictions. But more broadly, they’re trying to push the court to build on an oft-forgotten Supreme Court decision, Colautti v. Franklin, that stumbles around the definition of “viability.” Should they be successful, the result would effectively establish embryonic “personhood” and eradicate abortion rights, all without pushing the justices into the uncomfortable position of being the first federal appeals court to directly contravene abortion rights law.

“All else being equal, it’s undisputed it’s better for a woman to have an abortion earlier than later,” Jorgensen said. “The state would prefer there be no abortions, but we’re not allowed to do that at this time.”

Colautti v. Franklin is a 1979 decision involving a Pennsylvania anti-abortion law that was ultimately struck for being too vague. But in the decision, the Supreme Court discussed the issue of viability and what it means in relation to restricting abortion rights. There, the court said that “viability is reached when, in the judgment of the attending physician on the particular facts of the case before him, there is a reasonable likelihood of the fetus’ sustained survival outside the womb, with or without artificial support.”

The justices seized on this definition, prodding attorneys for the state and from the American Civil Liberties Union and Center for Reproductive Rights on whether the question of when viability occurs is a matter of fact—if so, the Eighth Circuit could send the case back to the lower court.

Gaustad saw his opening and took it, arguing that medical technology such as in-vitro fertilization has advanced to such a degree that a fertilized egg can now survive outside a womb, for anywhere from two to six days. That means: At the very least there is a question for a trial to resolve, about whether conception should now be the standard for fetal viability and thus the point at which states lose the power to outright ban abortion. The state should be allowed to put forward its “experts” that support this claim that conception and viability are now interchangeable concepts in both science and the law.

Not so, rebutted Janet Crepps from the Center for Reproductive Rights, who represented North Dakota’s only abortion clinic in successfully challenging the law in the lower court. “What [the attorneys are] really simply expressing is they really don’t like prior decisions and they’d like the Supreme Court to reconsider them,” Crepps said.

And that is exactly it. The problem is, judging from Tuesday’s arguments, it’s also pretty clear that the judges of the Eighth Circuit don’t like those prior decisions either.

At stake is the question of whether Texas' remaining legal abortion clinics—16 currently operate in the state, down from 41 a little more than 18 months ago—will be allowed to stay open without making costly renovations or leasing new facilities to comply with hospital-like standards imposed by state lawmakers in 2013.

Judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans asked tough questions about Texas’ omnibus anti-abortion law, HB 2, in front of a packed New Orleans courtroom Wednesday morning. At stake is the question of whether Texas’ remaining legal abortion clinics—16 currently operate in the state, down from 41 a little more than 18 months ago—will be allowed to stay open without making costly renovations or leasing new facilities to comply with hospital-like standards imposed by state lawmakers in 2013.

From the first minutes of the hour-long oral arguments, it was clear that Judges Catharina Haynes and Jennifer Elrod, both George W. Bush appointees who have previously ruled in favor of earlier challenges to HB 2, had no intention of throwing softball questions either to the State of Texas, which is defending HB 2’s increased abortion restrictions as medically reasonable and constitutional, or to the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is representing the plaintiffs, a group of independent Texas abortion providers who say HB 2 imposes an undue burden on Texans who seek legal abortion care.

The third panel judge, Edward Prado, another George W. Bush appointee, presided over the hearings and added some levity to a tense courtroom, asking whether everyone gathered might not rather hear two unrelated cases first instead of tackling the controversial HB 2 arguments.

Before the court are two issues, separate from challenges made to HB 2 in late 2013, though by now most of the law’s multi-part language has been challenged in court. HB 2, as it is written, bans abortion after 20 weeks, severely restricts the prescription of medication abortion pills, requires abortion-providing doctors to have hospital admitting privileges within 30 miles of where they perform procedures, and mandates that abortion clinics adopt the standards, both operational and physical, of ambulatory surgical centers.

The stakes are high for Texans who need legal abortion care, but Elrod downplayed the role of the Fifth Circuit despite the packed courtroom and media presence inside and outside the courthouse.

“We’re just a lower inferior court, we’re not here to make abortion policy for America,” Elrod said.

Nevertheless, her panel’s ruling could direct the course of abortion-related law as multiple states across the country impose ever more onerous restrictions on abortion providers and, many believe, the Supreme Court prepares to take up cases that have been winding their way through circuit appeals courts over the past couple of years.

This latest challenge asks the federal courts to strike down the ambulatory surgical center requirement across the state, and to strike the admitting privileges requirement specifically for El Paso and McAllen in West and South Texas, where abortion access is particularly limited.

The Fifth Circuit, as an appeals court, is not tasked with fact-finding but rather with evaluating the lower court record. In this case, the lower Western District Court of Texas, in October, declared HB 2’s ASC requirements unconstitutional and lifted the admitting privileges requirement for both El Paso and McAllen. The Supreme Court has put the Western District ruling in place, allowing non-ASC clinics to stay open until the Fifth Circuit rules on the oral arguments heard Wednesday.

In the cavernous wood-paneled courtroom, Haynes peppered counsel with questions about whether it might be unsafe for women to have “bleeding events” after their procedures while driving hundreds of miles to and from clinics across desolate areas of the state, and Elrod concentrated on weedy legal issues regarding precedent and other circuit court rulings.

Three issues appeared time and again during the arguments on Wednesday: first, whether the Fifth Circuit should apply a “rational basis” standard to evaluating the constitutionality of HB 2—that is, to evaluate whether the law’s tenets are rationally related to the legislature’s stated purpose of improving the health and safety of abortion patients.

Second, whether the state could defend HB 2 as medically necessary while also suggesting that El Pasoans who are unable to travel to the interior of the state should simply drive into nearby New Mexico, where abortion restrictions are much looser, belying the State of Texas’ claims that the law was not meant to restrict access to abortion by closing clinics.

And third, whether established numerical parameters—like the number of miles a Texan might be required to drive to the nearest abortion facility, or the fraction of Texans affected by long travel distances—could or should be established as automatic proof of an undue burden.

Haynes opened with a line of questioning concerning the physical plant changes required by HB 2, which mandates that abortion providers operate as hospital-like ambulatory surgical centers, which could mean multi-million dollar renovations for small clinics.

“What is the underlying relationship between building requirements and sterility?” Haynes asked Texas Solicitor General Jonathan Mitchell, who said that Texas lawmakers had a right to require hospital-like environments because some medical experts believed that sterile operating rooms improved the standard of care for abortion patients.

Haynes replied that “you can kind of find an expert to say anything,” and wondered if “marble floors in abortion clinics” could be legislated if the state could find just one expert to say they were necessary.

But Haynes also directed her pointed questions at the plaintiffs; she asked CRR staff attorney Stephanie Toti for evidence in the court record about abortion’s overall safety and the capacity of existing ambulatory surgical providers to meet the demand for abortion care.

Haynes especially took issue with abortion providers’ claims that hospital admitting privileges had been denied to a doctor in El Paso purely because she was an abortion provider, saying that was already considered discrimination under Texas law.

“That’s a lawsuit against that hospital as far as I’m concerned,” Haynes said. “Shouldn’t she have pursued that since she has a remedy there rather than invalidate HB 2?”

Toti remained focused on the interconnectedness of the admitting privileges law and the El Paso doctor’s denial of privileges, saying that HB 2 improperly put the ability to determine who can and cannot provide legal abortion care in the hands of potentially fickle, and unmonitored, hospital boards and staff.

Both supporters of reproductive rights and anti-choice groups told RH Reality Check that they had positive takeaways from the hearing.

“I feel like the court did want to exercise deference to the legislative body of Texas to make these decisions,” Allan Parker, president of the Justice Foundation, told RH Reality Check. The Justice Foundation is a San Antonio-based anti-choice legal group that works to make abortion illegal and filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Fifth Circuit supporting HB 2.

Amy Hagstrom Miller, the CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, the lead plaintiff in this legal challenge and a multi-location abortion provider with clinics in Texas, Minnesota, and Maryland, told RH Reality Check after the arguments that she was “very encouraged.”

“They understood what a burden it is for women in McAllen and El Paso,” said Hagstrom Miller, who said she appreciated the judges’ questions that tackled Texas’ claims that women can travel to New Mexico if they want abortion care.

Susan Hays, an appellate attorney and board member of Jane’s Due Process, a nonprofit organization that helps minors obtain legal abortions in Texas, told RH Reality Check that trying to suss out an appeals panel decision based on oral arguments alone was “like reading tea leaves,” but acknowledged that the judges “asked the hard questions of both sides.”

Even though the 113th Congress was the least productive in modern history, it did manage to do some work to proactively fight for reproductive rights.

A new report from the Center for Reproductive Rights finds that while the 113th Congress saw no shortage of anti-choice legislation, it also marked the beginning of a surge of pro-choice activism from lawmakers who normally take a more defensive posture on reproductive freedom.

Reproductive rights advocates also took to the Hill to push for ending the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits Medicaid funding for abortion care and disproportionately affects women of color and poor women.

Congress hasn’t passed a law actively protecting abortion rights since 1994, when the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act responded to widespread anti-choice violence by outlawing violence or obstruction at reproductive health clinics.

Abortion rights were in crisis in the 1990s due to the threat of clinic violence, the report’s authors said, and they are in crisis again today with the hundreds of medically unnecessary restrictions on abortion passed at the state level in the past few years.

This sense of crisis seems to be motivating pro-choice members of Congress to do more than just try to stop the latest anti-choice attack on Roe v. Wade.

Unlike the FACE Act, however, almost none of the pro-choice measures introduced in the last Congress actually passed the Republican-dominated House or the filibuster-blockaded Senate—except the Peace Corps abortion parity rule change, which finally made it through in the new spending bill.

But that change, while hailed as a victory by reproductive rights advocates, was a relatively small one. It only gave Peace Corps volunteers the same very limited abortion coverage that all other federal employees already have.

Anti-choice legislators will also benefit from the status quo on issues like the Hyde Amendment or the ban on Washington, D.C. funding abortion coverage through Medicaid. Those provisions aren’t permanent law, but they are habitually renewed every year, and failing to do so is still seen as a political non-starter.

Still, according to the report, pro-choice advocates seem encouraged by the pushback against anti-choice forces in Congress, and expect that trend to continue in 2015 and beyond.

Texas’ omnibus anti-abortion access law, which in part requires abortion providers to operate as mini-hospitals, will return to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals this week. The Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), which is representing a group of independent Texas abortion providers, and the Texas attorney general’s office, are set to make oral arguments before a three-judge panel on Wednesday morning.

This is the second time a federal court challenge to the multi-part HB 2 has made it to the notoriously conservative Fifth Circuit, which has upheld previously challenged tenets of HB 2 as constitutional, though Texas abortion providers and reproductive justice groups say the law, passed in 2013, imposes an “undue burden” on Texans who seek legal abortion care and would shutter all but a handful of legal abortion providers in the state.

An early October 2014 ruling from the Fifth Circuit allowed Texas to fully enforce HB 2 for less than two weeks, closing all but eight legal abortion providers in Texas before a subsequent Supreme Court ruling put another temporary hold on the law and allowed eight more shuttered clinics to reopen.

There are currently 16 legal abortion providers in Texas, down from 41 in May 2013.

During Wednesday’s oral arguments, three George W. Bush-appointed appeals court judges, including judges Catherina Haynes and Jennifer Elrod, who have heard challenges to HB 2 and ruled in favor of the law, will dedicate about an hour to questioning counsel for the State of Texas and CRR.

Haynes, Elrod, and Edward Prado will then rule—in the coming weeks or months—on whether a lower Western District Court judge who heard the initial challenge to the law was correct in deeming the law unconstitutional. Ultimately, legal experts expect the law to make it all the way to the Supreme Court.

A staff attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights told RH Reality Check that CRR is “pretty optimistic” about their challenge to the law, despite the fact that two of the three Fifth Circuit Court judges have upheld other parts of HB 2.

The first federal challenge to HB 2 took up the medication abortion and admitting privileges provisions of the law as they affected clinics statewide, while the most recent federal challenge takes up the admitting privileges provisions only as they apply to clinics in the Rio Grande Valley and El Paso and the ambulatory surgical center provision as it affects clinics statewide.

“We’re pretty optimistic because we got such a great ruling and a great record from the court below,” said CRR staff attorney David Brown, referencing the October 2014 Western District ruling that blocked part of HB 2’s enforcement. “I think the district court was really clear in the impact it would have in terms of closing most of the abortion clinics in Texas, and the fact that there is no basis at all in protecting women’s health for this law.”

More than half of Texas’ legal abortion providers have closed their doors since anti-choice lawmakers passed HB 2 in a second special legislative session called in July 2013, following state Sen. Wendy Davis’ 13-hour filibuster of the bill that originally foiled the plans of anti-choice Texas legislators.

In the wake of HB 2, entire swaths of the state—particularly in South and West Texas—have been left without legal abortion providers for weeks and months at a time as clinics ping-pong between opening and closing, depending on the latest federal court rulings.

About a dozen reproductive justice activists with the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health (NLIRH) will make a ten-hour bus trip from South Texas’ Rio Grande Valley to New Orleans to witness the Fifth Circuit proceedings and to hold a “peaceful demonstration” outside the court after oral arguments.

“The Rio Grande Valley is one of the areas hardest hit, not only by HB 2, but also by the [family planning] budget cuts in 2011,” said Ana Rodriguez DeFrates, the Texas director for policy and advocacy at NLIRH. She added that the NLIRH presence is intended “to really show Texas and the rest of the country that Texas Latinas are watching and that they’re paying attention, they’re plugged in, they’re concerned.”

If HB 2 were to go into full effect, one of the major challenges to accessing legal abortion care—in addition to day- or night-long round-trip drives across portions of the state—is interior border patrol checkpoints that prevent unauthorized Texans from traveling outside South Texas to major cities where the only abortion-providing ambulatory surgical centers are currently located.

Legislators and politicians who championed HB 2 in 2013 claimed it would increase the safety of abortion care, though mainstream medical groups warned that the law was medically unnecessary and could “jeopardize women’s health care” by making abortion harder to access, particularly for low-income and unauthorized Texans.

A December 2014 study, published in Obstetrics & Gynecology, analyzed data from more than 50,000 legal abortions performed in clinics in California and found that “major complications” occurred “less than a quarter of a percent of the time, about the same frequency as colonoscopies.”

In two separate orders, the state's highest court blocked new hospital admitting privileges requirements and restrictions on medication abortions from taking effect while trials challenging their legality proceed.

The state’s highest court first blocked an Oklahoma law that requires all reproductive health-care clinics to have a physician with local hospital admitting privileges on site when abortion procedures are performed—a requirement pushed by anti-choice activists that has proven medically unnecessary.

In a separate order, the court blocked a state law that severely restricts medication abortion procedures in the state by mandating doctors follow outdated FDA protocol in administering abortion-inducing drugs. The law bans all medication abortions after 49 days of pregnancy, which forces patients to undergo a surgical procedure when they would otherwise have the option of using safe and effective medications.

Attorneys for the Center for Reproductive Rights, in separate lawsuits, challenged both laws as unconstitutional. But rulings from two different lower court judges allowed the restrictions to take effect November 1.

Tuesday’s orders mean those laws will now be blocked while each case returns to the lower courts.

“Today the Oklahoma Supreme Court handed the women of Oklahoma a crucial victory by protecting their constitutional rights and restoring critical options for those seeking safe and legal abortion services,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights. “Time and time again, courts are seeing that the true motive behind these underhanded and baseless restrictions is to push essential reproductive health care services out of reach for as many women as possible.”

Tuesday’s ruling means Larry A. Burns, a physician challenging the restrictions who has been providing nearly half of all abortions in the state, can reopen his practice and continue offering safe and legal abortion services while the litigation continues.

“We are relieved the court has stepped in to protect women’s access to safe, legal abortion in Oklahoma,” said Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “A woman’s access to safe, legal abortion should not depend upon where she happens to live. That cannot be what the Supreme Court intended when it has repeatedly affirmed a woman’s constitutional right to make personal medical decisions.”

Attorneys from the Center for Reproductive Rights filed an emergency appeal with the Oklahoma Supreme Court asking them to blocking a ruling Wednesday that allowed new restrictions on medication abortions to take effect.

Attorneys from the Center for Reproductive Rights filed an emergency appeal Wednesday night with the Oklahoma Supreme Court to block new restrictions on medication abortions set to take effect November 1.

The filing came the same day a lower court refused to block HB 2684, a law that prohibits the off-label use of the drug RU-486 (or mifepristone) and bans all medication abortions after 49 days of pregnancy.

HB 2684 is the third time in the past four years Oklahoma politicians have passed legislation restricting access to medication abortion.

Lawmakers in 2011 passed a measure that would have effectively banned the method. That law was eventually struck down by the Oklahoma Supreme Court in a decision the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review.

Oklahoma lawmakers passed HB 2684 in response to that legal defeat.

Attorneys from the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) cited the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s previous ruling striking the 2011 medication abortion restrictions as grounds for granting their request filed Wednesday. In order to comply with the law in effect and avoid serious penalties, doctors will be forced to either stop providing medical abortions entirely or follow dangerous outdated and inferior state-mandated protocol, according to the court papers.

The attorneys argued that some Oklahoma patients will lose access to medication abortion altogether and those patients that receive the state-mandated protocol will be forced to receive medical treatment that is less effective, more burdensome, and leaves those patients more likely to require surgical follow-up, the attorneys argue.

Some patients will be delayed in accessing abortion services, which then increases the health risks for those patients.

This is the second emergency motion pending before the Oklahoma Supreme Court related to anti-choice restrictions set to take effect November 1. On Monday, attorneys from CRR filed an emergency motion asking the Oklahoma Supreme Court to block a lower court ruling that allowed new hospital admitting privileges requirements to take effect.

Reproductive rights advocates filed an emergency motion Monday with the Oklahoma Supreme Court, asking the state’s highest court to put on hold new anti-choice regulations set to take effect November 1.

Attorneys from the Center for Reproductive Rights filed the emergency motion on behalf of Dr. Larry Burns, a Norman-based abortion provider who provides about 44 percent of the abortions in the state. Burns, according to court filings, has been unable to obtain the required hospital admitting privileges and will likely be forced to stop providing abortions should the law be enforced.

In their motion papers, attorneys for the Center for Reproductive Rights argue Graves’ order allowing SB 1848 to take effect erred on several fronts, including wrongly, and without any analysis, concluding Burns would be unable to successfully show the admitting privileges law violates Oklahoma’s “single-subject” rule.

This rule requires laws passed in the state to deal with one discreet issue. SB 1848 deals with six distinct provisions that have no common theme or purpose, according to the plaintiffs.

Burns also claims the law is an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority because it effectively grants hospital boards the power to determine who can and cannot provide abortions in the state.

Graves also ruled that Burns did not have standing to challenge the rule on behalf of patients who would likely face delays in accessing abortions should Burns be forced to close his clinic doors.

Those delays, the attorneys argue, will increase the cost and risk associated with the procedure. “Delay will also mean that some women do not get appointments in time to qualify for a medication abortion,” the brief says. “Other women may progress beyond the time when legal second trimester abortion is available in Oklahoma.”

The motion asks that the Oklahoma Supreme Court put the law on hold while a trial on its constitutionality proceeds.

“As Dr. Burns established, however, S.B. 1848 offends the rights of all Oklahoma citizens by violating the Oklahoma’s Constitution’s single-subject mandate, targeting physicians who provide abortion and their patients for discriminatory treatment and unconstitutionally delegating legislative authority to unelected officials,” Burns’ lawyers argued in their brief. “The Act would deprive Dr. Burns of his livelihood and deprive all women throughout the state of Oklahoma of access to safe medical care.”

The ongoing federal challenge to Texas' omnibus anti-abortion law made its way to the nation's highest court on Monday evening, with abortion providers asking Justice Antonin Scalia to put an appeals court decision on hold while their case makes its way through the judicial system.

After all but eight of Texas’ legal abortion facilities closed their doors or ceased providing abortion care over the weekend, the ongoing federal challenge to Texas’ omnibus anti-abortion law made its way to the nation’s highest court on Monday evening, with abortion providers asking Justice Antonin Scalia to put an appeals court decision on hold while their case makes its way through the judicial system.

“Women’s constitutional rights and access to safe, legal abortion care have been dealt a devastating blow,” Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a press release. The center is representing Texas abortion providers in this and one other challenge to the state’s new abortion law.

The majority of Texas’ 20 or so remaining legal abortion providers were forced to shutter or stop offering abortion care this weekend following a Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that overturned an earlier federal district court injunction against the law, allowing the state to begin fully enforcing HB 2, which anti-choice Texas legislators passed last summer despite weeks of public protest at the capitol building in Austin.

Northup continued: “We look now to the U.S. Supreme Court to immediately reinstate the injunction, allow the clinics to reopen, and put an end to the irreparable and unjustifiable harm to Texas women that is happening right now.”

The Fifth Circuit Court in New Orleans ruled that HB 2 did not constitute an “undue burden” for abortion-seeking Texans, overruling a district court decision made by Judge Lee Yeakel, who said in September that HB 2 “creates a brutally effective system of abortion regulation that reduces access to abortion clinics thereby creating a statewide burden for substantial numbers of Texas women.”

HB 2, which also restricts the prescription of medication abortion and bans abortion after 20 weeks, requires abortion providers to operate as ambulatory surgical centers and requires abortion-providing doctors to have admitting privileges at local hospitals.

These last two provisions are currently being challenged in the federal suit in question.

In its application asking the Supreme Court to vacate the Fifth Circuit’s stay on the lower district court’s ruling, the Center for Reproductive Rights called the Fifth Circuit ruling “demonstrably wrong,” arguing that the court incorrectly interpreted past legal precedent and dismissed biased testimony from witnesses brought by the Texas attorney general’s office, which has defended the law in court:

Although the asserted rationale for the challenged requirements is the protection of women’s health, the evidence presented at trial demonstrated that neither the ASC requirement nor the admitting-privileges requirement provides a health benefit to abortion patients, and in fact, the requirements will result in a net harm to women seeking abortions.

The abortion providers’ application is addressed directly to Judge Scalia, who oversees the Fifth Circuit. Scalia may now choose to rule on the application alone, or he may direct the decision to the full court.